Night Owl Cards

I remember when I lived in my first apartment back in the early 1990s -- when my wife and I were figuring out how the hell two people of the opposite sex could possibly live together in negative square footage -- we would get buried in Christmas cards. There was this wonderful archway between the living room and kitchen (the apartment did have its charms) and we filled that archway with all the cards we received. The cards traveled up one side, over the top, and down the other side. No space left over. As the years went on, the number of Christmas cards received dwindled, until here we are in 2015. We get a handful of cards from close relatives and a few older people who don't do the internet. They all fit into a six-inch Christmas tin. The archway is bare. I can chalk this up to two things: either people have gotten away from cards, letters and paper products in general, preferring to send greetings from a hot spot at Starbucks, or nobody likes us anymore. I prefer to g...

A couple of years ago, Topps came up with something called "cognac" parallels. A lot of us dubbed them " liquorfractors ," which was a much more appropriate name . The cards were pretty cool because although they never scanned well, they were a sight to see in person. Throw that card under a lamp and the light would bounce off the surface like an inebriated stained glass window. They were nice because although they didn't look like much just sitting there, they had a greater purpose. I'm pretty certain that this isn't the first time this reflective-glass technique has been used -- there were actual stained-glass-themed inserts in the '90s that reappeared again in this year's Archives -- and I'm sure it's been around since refractors were born. But the liquorfractors seemed to have spawned a recent trend of putting what look like shards of glass on the surface of your cards. Panini calls its Cooperstown parallels, like this o...

Baseball is tough to figure out. Yet we keep trying to figure it out. We offer up preseason predictions. They're almost always wrong. We declare teams dead for the season in May. We're usually wrong there, too (see: Dodgers). Earlier this afternoon, I proclaimed Hanley Ramirez as the best player I've seen this year after he scorched yet another home run. And then he made a really stupid fielding error. Baseball is always trolling us. Remember when people scoffed at comparisons between Clayton Kershaw and Sandy Koufax? Now Kershaw has the lowest ERA in the first 1,000 innings of his career out of anyone in history. Even better than Koufax. Remember when Ramirez was dealt to the Marlins in exchange for Josh Beckett (and Mike Lowell) and the trade was described as "a great deal for the Red Sox," and then later "a great deal for the Marlins" and then later, "a trade that benefited both teams"? Remember when Andre Ethier hit 31 hom...

I keep hearing about some "PWE Appreciation Week" thing happening next week -- send someone some cards in a PWE and let the joy unfold, or some such pleasantry. I'm not going to be able to participate. There's a lot going on around here and even more next week. Package-sending will take a dive. It's ugly, I know. But that's the way it's got to be. Our summers don't last long around here, you know. Got to hit that while you can ... or whatever the kids are saying these days. Fortunately, it's pretty much PWE Appreciation Week every week lately. I've received them and have been sending them out like never before. I already detailed that in an earlier post . Why I just received four PWEs in rapid succession a couple of days ago. I don't have a lot of time today, so I'm going to show them quickly together with less-than-usual commentary. First there is this shiny Duke Snider cards from 2011 Lineage. Remember Lineage? I actua...